The battery also takes forever to charge, even though there’s clearly not much juice in the first place! And hilariously, the charging cable is like fifty feet long and unnecessarily divided into two parts: one with the power supply, and one that connects the power supply to the PSP itself. The battery will be on its last bar when that UMD is over, and that’s with the backlight on “medium.” Turn that shit up to “high,” and you can forget about watching a UMD or playing a frigging game during a plane ride-it ain’t gonna last. My PSP-2000 came with a Family Guy compilation disk, which included four of Seth McFarlane’s favorite episodes (circa 2007). It’s less reliable while playing UMD movies than an iPod Video. But in the case of the former, clicking a link to see some screenshots often results in a five-minute load followed by images displayed “at reduced quality” to conserve memory. The only internet pages that display property and with some modicum of speed are those that have mobile versions like Kotaku or Facebook. More strenuous activities, like clicking links, have actually caused my little system to crash, shutting itself off with a disturbing “pop” sound, as if one of its silicon synapses just short-circuited. Merely loading up the page’s background makes the PSP have a seizure. At least half the time, the connection will time out OR the system will run out of memory before a single word has appeared onscreen. It is a useless exercise in tedium to try and load up your email, for example, because the page loads at the speed of a 28k modem. I wasn’t sure whether this is an OS problem or not, but the PSP’s web browser is worse than most cell phones. You are forced to actually set your PSP down and play your DS instead while Castlevania Chronicles downloads at the speed of smell. You can’t even zoom out to the menu screen. If you want to download Patapon 2, you’re gonna have to sit there and watch its progress bar slowly fill up. On the PS3, you can download like eight different things at once (aside from firmware updates) in the background and still play Uncharted 2 in the foreground or continue wandering around the PSN Store. Its biggest flaw is that you cannot do anything in the background. It’s sort of a low-res version of the PS3’s crossbar with far fewer options. The first, and most egregious offender is the PSP’s prehistoric operating system. For any other game, it’s not even noticeable. A word of caution, however: playing the Patapon games on your TV results in game-ruining lag between when you tap the drum button and when it actually registers. You can remote-play some PSN PS3 games (but not nearly enough), and you can access the PS3’s menu crossbar from the PSP. If you want to play your PSP games on the big screen, you can do that with the right cables. It plays music from a memory card, internet radio, and Skype. It plays UMD movies, although they aren’t really produced anymore. Second, the PSP really is a multimedia device. Also of some importance, the PSP makes good use of its giant widescreen format to display really crisp, colorful, and impressive graphics. These are all games I treasure, although I can’t shake the feeling that most of them could’ve been downloadable PSN titles. Before I dive into the bad, however, let’s talk about the few things the PSP gets right.įirst, there are some very high-profile, excellent games on the PSP: Mega Man Powered UP, Maverick Hunter X, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Patapon, Patapon 2, God of War: Chains of Olympus (which will soon-finally-get a sequel), and Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines to name a few. As time goes by, I have become intimately familiar with the PSP’s many flaws, and it has many. Well, we all know what happened next: the DS skyrocketed into the sales stratosphere where it has continued to stay ever since whereas the PSP has never actually been a big seller, or even a marginally big seller. My thoughts on the DS largely amounted to “it’s a GBA with a second screen.” The launch model was also ugly and bulky-nowhere near as attractive (in terms of form) as the sleeker, blacker PSP. My rationale was simple: the PSP had a big, sexy screen, PS2-quality visuals, and functioned as a multi-purpose media platform. Nintendo World Report readers probably don’t know that when the PSP and the DS were first announced, I was of the opinion that Sony’s handheld would dominate the market and quickly sink Nintendo’s new device. In fact, I’ve owned two: a launch version (sold to me by my brother), and a PSP-2000, which was funded by selling my launch version.
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